Heather Krasna

Columbia University | CU · Department of Health Policy and Management

Context: With $7.4 billion from the American Rescue Plan funding new hires in the public health workforce, health departments could benefit from well-written, accurate job descriptions and job postings/advertisements to attract candidates. Program: We wrote accurate job descriptions for 24 jobs common in governmental public health settings. Imp...

Between the 2009 Great Recession and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US state and local governmental public health workforce lost 40,000 jobs. Tens of thousands of workers also left during the pandemic and continue to leave. As governmental health departments are now receiving multimillion-dollar, temporary federal investments to replenish...

The recent movement underscoring the importance of career taxonomies has helped usher in a new era of transparency in PhD career outcomes. The convergence of discipline-specific organizational movements, interdisciplinary collaborations, and federal initiatives have all helped to increase PhD career outcomes tracking and reporting. Transparent and...

Objectives A key goal of schools and programs of public health is to prepare graduates for careers in the public health workforce after graduation, but are they achieving this goal? We assessed how the employment outcomes of students earning public health degrees are collected and described in the literature. Methods Using the Kirkpatrick model of...

A strong public health workforce (PHW) is needed to respond to COVID-19 and public health (PH) issues worldwide. However, classifying, enumerating, and planning the PHW is challenging. Existing PHW taxonomies and enumerations focus on the existing workforce, and largely ignore workforce competition for public health graduates (PHGs). Such efforts a...

Objectives. To improve understanding of the future public health workforce by analyzing first-destination employment outcomes of public health graduates. Methods. We assessed graduate outcomes for those graduating in 2015–2018 using descriptive statistics and the Pearson χ2 test. Results. In our analysis of data on 53 463 graduates, we found that...

Background Many competencies frameworks exist worldwide and it is well known that competence-based education supports employability. However, little research exists regarding public health graduates' employment outcomes. This paper aims to stir the discussion about the expectations of the global health employment market and the competencies, which...

As postsecondary tuition and debt levels continue to rise, the value proposition of higher education has been increasingly called into question by the popular media and the general public. Recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics now show early career earnings and debt, by program, for thousands of institutions across the Unite...

Climate change is acknowledged to be a major risk to public health. Skills and competencies related to climate change are becoming a part of the curriculum at schools of public health and are now a competency required by schools in Europe and Australia. However, it is unclear whether graduates of public health programs focusing on climate change ar...

Context: Much has been written about the public health workforce, but very little research has been published—and none in a peer-reviewed journal or other report since 1992—regarding the employment outcomes and employment sectors of graduate students pursuing public health as an area of study. Objectives: Our objectives were to review the literatu...

Analysis of the employment outcomes of global health graduate students.

Jobs That Matter provides job seekers with the tips they need to land a great job in government (including local, state, and federal), nonprofit, or corporate organizations serving the public good. This book helps you pinpoint the right public service career for your interests and talents, and then helps you land it with key research, networking, r...